Monday, September 30, 2013

Millennials and marriage

September 18, 2013 (The Public Discourse)
- It’s a cold, sleety Minnesota day, and I’m in a classroom with 25
undergraduate students, talking about marriage. This discussion is the
culmination of a mini-unit in which (among other things) we examined
sociological data showing worrisome marital trends in America.

We discussed how various social problems, particularly among the poor,
might be ameliorated through a strengthening of marriage. Charles Murray’s portrayal of “Fishtown,” combined with the New York Times’ “Two Classes, Divided By ‘I Do,’”
painted vividly the challenges that a weak marriage culture creates for
poor families. Now I put the question to the students: What might help?
How can we better encourage people to get and stay married?
A young man raises his hand. “This unit was interesting, but the
university should offer whole classes on marriage. A lot of people don’t
realize how important it is, for their kids and just for having a happy
life.”

Another hand. “They should talk about this in high school, too. It
seems like we heard a lot of warnings about drugs and dropping out and
safe sex. I don’t remember hearing anything about marriage.”

A third student chimes in, “Parents should talk with their kids about
it. Mine never did. I sort of wanted them to, but it was awkward to ask,
you know?” A number of heads nodded in agreement.
The first time I heard students talk like this, I was amazed. I have
rarely known undergraduates to be so self-aware. I would almost have
thought that they were telling me what I wanted to hear, had not long
experience taught me that students were thoroughly inept at discerning
what I wanted to hear.
Now, after several semesters of discussing marriage with my
introductory ethics classes, I’ve heard these concerns expressed enough
times to conclude that, for all their righteous zeal concerning sexual
freedom, undergraduates do actually know that they are confused about
marriage.

This is interesting, particularly since the young people in question
are not particularly religious or conservative. My students represent a
fairly standard cross-section of middle-class American 20-year-olds.
They can talk all day about the evils of global warming and homophobia,
but the decline of marriage is, for most of them, a fairly new subject.
Nevertheless, they are easily convinced that our society has a marriage
problem, because they know that they have a marriage problem, which their teachers and parents have done little to help them resolve.

To me, this frank uncertainty about marriage makes a fitting
centerpiece in the tragic tableau of today’s young Americans. They seem
to be almost perfectly unsuited to the social and political climate of
their time, like hothouse flowers whose cultivators failed to note that
they were destined to be planted in an alpine tundra. The problem, in a
nutshell, is this: young people want the right things (security, love,
and a prosperous life), but they have very wrong ideas about how best to
attain them.
Today’s undergraduates are not, for the most part, radicals and
revolutionaries. They harbor conventional hopes of professional success
and happy marriages. But while they believe that the first can reliably
be secured through hard work and dedication, marriage seems in their
minds to require a mysterious mixture of good fortune and good
chemistry, perhaps combined with the social status that they hope to win
through professional success.

Unfortunately, they have things exactly backwards. A good marriage is
the sort of thing that almost anyone can aspire to, regardless of
skills, education, or status. The most important ingredients for marital
success are within any individual’s power to attain. Professional
success, by contrast, does reflect hard work and commitment, but it also
depends on complex external factors that no individual person can
control. For today’s rising generation, those external factors are not
looking promising.
The students of private universities are, for the most part, children
of privilege, and they behave as such. David Brooks has written
extensively on this, and my observations agree largely with his: today’s
undergraduates are industrious, well-habituated rule followers who have
been superbly socialized to conform to the expectations of their
elders. They take it as axiomatic that they have obligations to
alleviate the suffering of the less fortunate through political action,
which is the duty they pay for their ideological commitment to equality.
At the same time, they regard it as their birthright to inherit the
prosperous and secure world that their parents mostly enjoyed. Even as
they stand on the cusp of significant political and economic change, I
find my students to be curiously uninterested in helping to reshape the
future. For the most part, they are content with their conventional
goals of upward mobility, material comfort, and marital success.
The first two will not come easily. Recent studies suggest that college
graduates are struggling to find jobs and that those who do are likely
to find themselves busing tables or stocking shelves. The mainstream
press has been writing about this for some time now, but oddly, the
reality does not seem to have set in for most of my students. They
remain convinced that they are among America’s best and brightest, which
is an odd assumption for a middling student at a university that US News classifies as “an A-Plus School for B Students.”
I got a particularly nice illustration of this complacency a few years
ago, when the peak of the Occupy Wall Street frenzy happened to coincide
with a mini-unit my class was doing on work and the ethics of labor. I
attempted to use current events as a lead-in by asking the students for
their views on the protests. What, in their view, had precipitated the
outburst? Was the anger justified? I expected that this, if anything,
would be a great example of a “youth issue.”

I was mistaken. My students knew almost nothing about Occupy Wall
Street, and they showed little interest in learning more. I was amused
to find myself making the sympathetic case for the OWS protesters, while
my students comfortably asserted that graduates of “a good four-year
school” like theirs were unlikely to find themselves in such an awkward
situation. Clearly none of them had (like me) seen in these angry,
disaffected twenty-somethings the specter of themselves a few years down
the road.

Their confidence might seem inexplicable, given the hard data.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, young Americans under 25
are currently unemployed at almost twice the rate of older workers;
more than 10 million are out of work. College graduates are not immune
to this trend, as seen in a decline in wages (down 8.5% since 2000),
benefits, and overall employment rates.
With storm clouds forming on their professional horizons, where do
marriage and family fit into the average undergraduate’s plans? As my
students’ comments reflect, they are far less confident on this point.
Most of them do value marriage. A recent Pew survey suggests
that 70% of millennials hope to marry someday, and in my discussions
with students, I have yet to hear them claim that marriage should be
jettisoned as an expression of trite, bourgeois values. Even those who
don’t definitely wish to marry will readily agree that marriage is, in
general, a good thing.
Yet they don’t know how to get there. Even as their path to
professional success was being artificially and perhaps fraudulently
over-programmed, the path to a happy married life was mostly left for
them to discover on their own. They have some idea of the goods that
they hope to attain through marriage: stability, emotional fulfillment,
family. But they aren’t sure how this package of benefits should fit
together—let alone how they should go about attaining it.

The wisdom they do have fits nicely with current statistical trends and
with what is coming to be known as the “soul mate” or “capstone” model
of marriage. According to this model, marriage should be put off until
one is established, or on the cusp of becoming established. Very few of
my students seem to expect or hope to be married during their college
years or shortly afterwards, which may help to explain why newlyweds
(particularly those with university degrees) have been getting steadily
older.

According to the “capstone” model, proper time should be taken to
develop a relationship before marriage is considered. Early marriage and
brief courtships are condemned in the harshest terms by students, who
regard intimacy and demonstrated personal compatibility as the best
safeguards against marital unhappiness or divorce.

Much ink has been spilled over the connections among age, education,
and marital success. By now it is an accepted fact that the capstone
model has worked moderately well for the educated upper class, and far
less well for poorer and less educated Americans. Americans across all
demographics place more emphasis on the emotional and romantic aspects
of marriage than their great-grandparents would have done.
Talking with the relatively privileged attendees of a four-year
university has made me realize, however, that the rationale behind late
marriage goes far beyond the romance. College students take comfort in
laying out a path to marriage that connects with another area of life
that they think they understand, namely, educational and professional
ladder-climbing. Good spouses, they often suggest, will be found in
higher-status professions and social circles, and they themselves will
“qualify” for a good marriage if they achieve similar professional
status.
Having devoted so much energy and attention to the education game, they
naturally fold happy marriage into the spoils they already associate
with professional accomplishment. The organic link between marriage and
parenthood may be severely weakened, but marriage, prosperity, and
professional success are coming to be seen as an “organic” package of a
different kind.
As crass as this view may seem, there are actually some upsides. Young
people see marriage as a prize worth working for and worth protecting
once it has been attained. Statistical data would also suggest that they
are not entirely wrong to think that marriage becomes easier when a
couple is more mature and better established.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of reasons to worry. If marriage is a
reward for professional establishment, this means that success in life
comes in a kind of double-or-nothing package. If that is the case, one
ramification will be that fewer good jobs will mean fewer good
marriages. Even among the elite, this is not a promising model in an
economic downturn. The unemployed young, in particular, will end up
rootless, purposeless, and lacking the stability that marriage and
commitment can provide.

There is no getting around the fact that this is a difficult time in
which to come of age. As they move into adulthood, millennials will
suffer more disappointment than their parents. They will have to work
harder in exchange for less security, less comfort and less upward
mobility than their parents enjoyed. At this point, it is probably
beyond anyone’s power to change that sobering reality. But it may still
be possible to help the rising generation by showing them that their
basic paradigm for success in life is upside-down. They imagine that
worldly success is readily attainable, and hope to be lucky in love.
They must be brought to understand that committed love can be chosen and
cultivated even in difficult circumstances, while worldly success
depends much more heavily on the winds of fortune.

It is encouraging to find, at least, that many young people today are
open to learning more about marriage. They may be relieved to hear that
it is not, after all, such a mystery. Eons of wisdom can help us to make
sense of what it is, and how it works, and how it can be made to work.
Marriage has given structure and purpose to the lives of an incredibly
diverse array of people, across millennia of human history. It can work
for young Americans today. And the consolations of family life could
help to compensate for the other disappointments and challenges that
these over-optimistic youth are likely to encounter once they move
beyond the classroom.

Millennials want to hear this, and they need to know. If their elders
want to atone for the mistakes of yesteryear, now is the time to start
talking about marriage.Reprinted with permission from The Public Discourse

Euthanasia
is targeting people in the Netherlands like never before and the number
of people killed via euthanasia has doubled over the last 10 years. A
new report indicates Dutch euthanasia deaths jumped 13 percent last year
as 4,188 people died.
The report also indicated the mentally disabled and psychological
patients are being targeted — with 42 people with dementia and 13 with
psychiatric problems dying via euthanasia.From the report:

Voluntary euthanasia or physician assisted suicide, where a doctor is present while a patient kills themselves, usually by drinking a strong barbiturate potion, has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002.
Requests have risen steadily since 2003 when 1,626 people applied for
medically administered euthanasia, in most cases by a lethal injection,
or assisted suicide.
As previously controversial “mercy killings” have become socially and
medically acceptable, the number of cases, the vast majority of medical
euthanasia, have more than doubled over the decade to 2012.

One explanation for the steep rise of Dutch cases is the introduction
last year of mobile euthanasia units allowing patients to be killed by
voluntary lethal injection when family doctors refused.

Around 80 per cent of people who request euthanasia die at home and
are killed by doctors on the grounds that they are suffering unbearable
pain and are making an informed choice. The opinion of a second doctor
is also required.
Those suffering from nervous system disorders were in second place,
257, followed by the euthanasia of 156 people suffering from
cardiovascular disease.

Forty two people with dementia and 13 patients suffering severe
psychiatric problems were medically killed in cases that are rarer and
still generate concern over the competence of individuals to request
death.

The report details the case of one patient with dementia who was
supposedly in a “lucid moment” long enough to tell her doctor, “Yes, I
want euthanasia.”
The Netherlands has been under fire for racing to approve euthanasia for disabled newborns and there have been significant abuses.

Earlier this month, I sat in a Denver, CO conference room eager
to hear former Senator Rick Santorum speak. Santorum was an honored
guest at the 2013 CareNet National Pregnancy Conference.
He came to share encouraging words with leaders and staff workers from
hundreds of Pregnancy Resource Centers across the country.

It was my first time hearing Santorum speak in person. Watching
televised speeches and interviews gave me a glance into his heart. I
admired the way he cared for his daughter Bella and was inspired by his
stand against abortion.
I was struggling with feelings of failure the night before Santorum
spoke. I felt ashamed because of situations in my life where I desired
to share truth with others but let fear silence me. When Santorum
mentioned failure and fear, I paid attention. He talked about a time in
his life when he was afraid. He was afraid to speak out against abortion
while in the Senate. People told him if he did, his career would be
over. They would label him as a ultra conservative freak or religious
nut. For a while he remained silent. Then it got to a point where he
couldn’t be silent any longer.
Partial-birth abortion was being debated, an act so gruesome and
utterly offensive it demanded a voice to fight against it. Rick became
that voice. In 1999 he debated a Ban on Partial birth abortion with
Barbara Boxer. Not an easy or pleasant feat, but he did it well. This
is one of the most heartfelt and honest speeches against abortion I’ve
ever heard. He sounds like a modern day William Wilberforce.

One debate with Boxer on Partial Birth abortion lasted 6 hours. The
vote was to be taken the next morning. After 6 hours Rick still had to
more to say. He went back out before two people and a TV crew and spoke
for an hour and a half about disabled children and abortion. He finished
the debate and went home to wait. The next morning he got the
devastating news that they loss by two votes. Rick said he felt like a
failure, as both a leader and father. He felt guilty for taking time
away from his wife and children to fight a losing battle.

Five days later Rick received an email from a college student
at Michigan State Univ. The man said his girlfriend and him
were sleeping on the couch, flipping channels when they stopped at
Rick’s speech on CSPAN. As they listened the man turned to his
girlfriend and saw tears running down her face. ”I’m pregnant”, she
said. “I had an abortion scheduled in a few days but I’m not going to go
through with it now”. This young man told Rick, “You may have lost the
vote to override President Clinton’s veto that day but you saved the
life of my child”.

I wept when I heard that story.
Rick told us we’re winners in the fight for life. Even when we feel
like we’ve failed we’re still making a difference. In 2005 I lived in
Washington, D.C with a company of young people at the Justice House of Prayer
who prayed for governmental leaders to oppose abortion. In one
season most of that company was stationed in another location. Their
were just three of us left in D.C who went to the Supreme Court to
pray. Tiffani, Marybeth and myself. We stood in front of the marble
steps, waved to the police offers and prayed earnestly. At that point we
had one main request. We prayed for the Ban on Partial birth abortion
to pass. Others were praying with us. A YMAM team in D.C, our
intercessors friends in South Carolina and people around the nation.
Although we stood as 3 girls in front of the Supreme Court we
represented thousands of voices.
That was a hard season for me. I failed often during that time. Yet I
kept praying and believing my voice counted in heaven. I was privileged
to be praying at the court when news broke that they upheld a federal
law banning Partial birth abortions. A newspaper snapped my picture. If
you look closely you can see tears rolling down my face. It was a moment
of victory.

Silent Prayers for Partial Birth Abortion Ban

We all feel like failures at times. In the fight to end abortion it
can often seem like we’re Davids before the Goliath of government or
Planned Parenthood. In moments of uncertainty remember your voice
counts. Your making a difference and daily winning the battle for life.
Clinics are closing, laws are changing, babies are being saved, men and
women are confessing abortion has hurt them. Rick thanked us for the
work we do. I want to thank you. Don’t lose hope, you’re on a winning
team.

Former President George H.W. Bush acts as witness at gay ‘wedding’

KENNEBUNKPORT, ME, September 27, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– Former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush
acted as witnesses at a lesbian “wedding” last Saturday.

The 41st president of the United States signed the legal document on behalf of Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalsen.
The two women, who own a store in the town of Kennebunkport, have known the Bushes for decades.

They said having the president play a ceremonial role in their union helped normalize homosexuality.
“Who would be best to help us acknowledge the importance of our wedding
as our friends and as the former leader of the free world?” Clement asked. “When they agreed to do so, we just felt that it was the next acknowledgment of being ‘real and normal.’”

She quickly posted a picture of the 89-year-old signing the license in
his wheelchair, wearing his signature loud socks, one red and one blue.
Barbara and Laura Bush have both stated they support same-sex "marriage." Both also support abortion-on-demand.

George W. Bush's daughter, who is also named Barbara, supports marriage redefinition, as well.
Perhaps most impacted is son Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor who
hopes to become the third Bush in the White House in 2016. Jeb says
same-sex “marriage” should be left up to the states to decide, but stated last year that loving gay couples “should be held up as examples for others to follow.”
The elder President Bush's reversal of his “no new taxes” pledge, his
willingness to sign a bill enforcing racial quotas, and his indifference
to social issues like abortion triggered a primary challenge from
pundit Pat Buchanan.
In his speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention,
Buchanan said, “This election is about much more than who gets what. It
is about who we are. It is about what we believe. It is about what we
stand for as Americans.”
He said the election was one front in a large “cultural war, as
critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War
itself.”

Some blamed Buchanan's speech, rather than Bush's lackluster campaign,
for the president's loss – a tactic repeated with Sarah Palin in 2008
and the pro-life/pro-marriage movement in 2012.

‘If you do abortions, it is very hard to get the privilege to work in a hospital, because they don’t like abortion providers.
‘They are almost all done in outpatient clinics, free-standing clinics, in this country,’ she says.
‘Being an abortion provider is very stigmatized. Other doctors look down on you and think of you as like the lowest of the low.’

Is it really that surprising that most doctors wouldn’t want to
associate with abortionists — and especially not with late-term
abortionists? Even the pro-aborts are forced to acknowledge that there are fewer and fewer doctors choosing to learn how to perform abortions. Sarp Aksel, the president of Medical Students for Choice, has said that students who want to learn about abortion are shunned in medical school.
Doctors take an oath to do no harm, yet abortionists like Robinson
make a very lucrative living by ripping babies to pieces, babies who
would almost always be able to survive outside of the womb. Doctors tend
to want to save lives, not take them. It’s easy to see how butchers who
take lives for a living would be frowned upon.

Is your favorite actor on NARAL’s #MenForChoice (aka abortion) list?

Last week, NARAL Pro-Choice America posted their first BuzzFeed article of pro-choice male celebrities, using #MenForChoice. Remember Mark Ruffalo’s pro-choice rant of a statement, I guess we would call it?

Well, he is second on NARAL’s list. Other mentions include David Cross from Arrested Development,
Ed Harris, Jack Black, Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, Stanley Tucci and
William H. Macy. There are others on the list, but these are the ones
I’m familiar with and fans of.
Now, I’ll admit I love Mark Ruffalo. What girl doesn’t love lame but cute romantic comedies like 13 Going on 30 and Just Like Heaven? And Shutter Island is one of my favorite movies, of all time.
I will admit it, and some pro-lifers will no doubt be shocked with
me, that his pro-choice opinions, no matter how fired up and
inarticulate they may be, do not matter one bit to me. The same goes for
the actors I mentioned above. Honestly, I don’t care what they say
about abortion, at least I don’t anymore or less than what anyone else
has to say about abortion. And I’m pretty much used to Hollywood being
full of celebrities not in agreement with me, and I say good riddance.
Most of them are a bunch of nuts anyway.

When I watch a movie, my decision to watch it comes down to as to if I
think it looks like a good movie. The same thing goes for when I
listen to a song. I’m subscribing to the entertainer’s talent, not their
political beliefs on abortion or any other issue.
When I went to a Pitbull concert, he said something along the lines
of how music brings all sorts of people together. Amen! Pitbull was
there to sing and bring us together to enjoy his music, not to discuss
policy. Coldplay, on the other hand, I am disappointed with, and that’s
because Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast Action Fund was at their concert. Not the time or the place, regardless of how you feel about abortion.

Would I like any of these celebrities more so if they were pro-life?
Absolutely. Of course I would. I don’t find that one’s acting ability
has anything to do with their pro-choice or pro-life viewpoints though.
I’m not going to stop seeing Mark Ruffalo’s movies because he says one
dumb thing about abortion which I don’t agree with. Now, if he were to
get involve himself in a movie where he spouts all the best things in
the world about abortion, well, I wouldn’t see that movie.
Admittedly, it is pretty cool and worth rejoicing over to have
celebrities on our side on this issue. And it is true that there would
be further reason to like that celebrity, but because of their status as
a positive role model rather than their acting or singing ability.

NARAL Pro-Choice American can tout all they wish to about having
these 11 #MenForChoice. Let them. Wouldn’t the joke be on them if one of
the eleven turned out to be pro-life someday? Sometimes it seems like
it would be cool to have more celebrities agree with us on this issue,
and we may question how come we don’t. It would also be nice if our
organizations got money from the government, like Planned Parenthood
does, or if the mainstream media and entertainment business made being
pro-life super cool.

At the end of the day though, we have truth and love on our side. The
abortion industry can glitz up their side all they want to, but that’s
because they actually have something a lot more awful to convince people
here.

You may choose to only involve yourself with celebrities who are
pro-life, or to allow your children to do so. That’s fine, and there is
merit to subscribing to those we know are good role models in that they
share this same belief. But, I know that I’m a strong enough pro-lifer
that it doesn’t matter to me if Mark Ruffalo or David Cross share my
viewpoint on abortion. Shutter Island may be one of my favorite movies and Arrested Developed may be pretty darn funny, but I don’t need either of its stars to reinforce my pro-life beliefs.

Friday, September 27, 2013

The ultrasound that changed my life - Abby Johnson’s pro-life conversion in her own words

Note: The following is the first chapter of Abby Johnson’s
forthcoming book. To find out more about the book, which will be
released January 11, click here.
January 10, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - CHERYL POKED HER HEAD INTO MY
OFFICE. “Abby, they need an extra person back in the exam room. Are you
free?”
I looked up from my paperwork, surprised. “Sure.”

Former Planned Parenthood director, and now pro-life activist Abby Johnson.

Though
I’d been with Planned Parenthood for eight years, I had never been
called into the exam room to help the medical team during an abortion,
and I had no idea why I was needed now. Nurse-practitioners were the
ones who assisted in abortions, not the other clinic staff. As director
of this clinic in Bryan, Texas, I was able to fill in for any position
in a pinch, except, of course, for doctors or nurses performing medical
procedures. I had, on a few occasions, agreed at a patient’s request to
stay with her and even hold her hand during the procedure, but only when
I’d been the counselor who’d worked with her during intake and
counseling. That was not the case today. So why did they need me?

Today’s visiting abortionist had been here at the Bryan clinic only
two or three times before. He had a private abortion practice about 100
miles away. When I’d talked with him about the job several weeks before,
he had explained that at his own facility he did only ultrasound-guided
abortions — the abortion procedure with the least risk of complications
for the woman. Because this method allows the doctor to see exactly
what is going on inside the uterus, there is less chance of perforating
the uterine wall, one of the risks of abortion. I respected that about
him. The more that could be done to keep women safe and healthy, the
better, as far as I was concerned. However, I’d explained to him that
this practice wasn’t the protocol at our clinic. He understood and said
he’d follow our typical procedures, though we agreed he’d be free to use
ultrasound if he felt a particular situation warranted it.

To my knowledge, we’d never done ultrasound-guided abortions at our
facility. We did abortions only every other Saturday, and the assigned
goal from our Planned Parenthood affiliate was to perform 25 to 35
procedures on those days. We liked to wrap them up by around 2 p.m. Our
typical procedure took about 10 minutes, but an ultrasound added about
five minutes, and when you’re trying to schedule up to 35 abortions in a
day, those extra minutes add up.

I felt a moment’s reluctance outside the exam room. I never liked
entering this room during an abortion procedure — never welcomed what
happened behind this door. But since we all had to be ready at any time
to pitch in and get the job done, I pushed the door open and stepped in.
The patient was already sedated, still conscious but groggy, the
doctor’s brilliant light beaming down on her. She was in position, the
instruments were laid out neatly on the tray next to the doctor, and the
nurse-practitioner was positioning the ultrasound machine next to the
operating table.
“I’m going to perform an ultrasound-guided abortion on this patient. I
need you to hold the ultrasound probe,” the doctor explained.

As I took the ultrasound probe in hand and adjusted the settings on the machine, I argued with myself, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to take part in an abortion.
No, wrong attitude — I needed to psych myself up for this task. I took a
deep breath and tried to tune in to the music from the radio playing
softly in the background. It’s a good learning experience — I’ve
never seen an ultrasound-guided abortion before, I told myself. Maybe
this will help me when I counsel women. I’ll learn firsthand about this
safer procedure. Besides, it will be over in just a few minutes.
I could not have imagined how the next 10 minutes would shake the foundation of my values and change the course of my life.

I had occasionally performed diagnostic ultrasounds for clients
before. It was one of the services we offered to confirm pregnancies and
estimate how far along they were. The familiarity of preparing for an
ultrasound soothed my uneasiness at being in this room. I applied the
lubricant to the patient’s belly, then maneuvered the ultrasound probe
until her uterus was displayed on the screen and adjusted the probe’s
position to capture the image of the fetus.

I was expecting to see what I had seen in past ultrasounds. Usually,
depending on how far along the pregnancy was and how the fetus was
turned, I’d first see a leg, or the head, or some partial image of the
torso, and would need to maneuver a bit to get the best possible image.
But this time, the image was complete. I could see the entire, perfect
profile of a baby.

It looks just like Grace at 12 weeks, I thought, surprised,
remembering my very first peek at my daughter, three years before,
snuggled securely inside my womb. The image now before me looked the
same, only clearer, sharper. The detail startled me. I could clearly see
the profile of the head, both arms, legs, and even tiny fingers and
toes. Perfect.

And just that quickly, the flutter of the warm memory of Grace was replaced with a surge of anxiety. What am I about to see? My stomach tightened. I don’t want to watch what is about to happen.
I suppose that sounds odd coming from a professional who’d been
running a Planned Parenthood clinic for two years, counseling women in
crisis, scheduling abortions, reviewing the clinic’s monthly budget
reports, hiring and training staff. But odd or not, the simple fact is, I
had never been interested in promoting abortion. I’d come to Planned
Parenthood eight years before, believing that its purpose was primarily
to prevent unwanted pregnancies, thereby reducing the number of
abortions. That had certainly been my goal. And I believed that Planned
Parenthood saved lives — the lives of women who, without the services
provided by this organization, might resort to some back-alley butcher.
All of this sped through my mind as I carefully held the probe in place.

“Thirteen weeks,” I heard the nurse say after taking measurements to determine the fetus’s age.
“Okay,” the doctor said, looking at me, “just hold the probe in place during the procedure so I can see what I’m doing.”

The cool air of the exam room left me feeling chilled. My eyes still
glued to the image of this perfectly formed baby, I watched as a new
image entered the video screen. The cannula — a strawshaped instrument
attached to the end of the suction tube — had been inserted into the
uterus and was nearing the baby’s side. It looked like an invader on the
screen, out of place. Wrong. It just looked wrong.

My heart sped up. Time slowed. I didn’t want to look, but I didn’t
want to stop looking either. I couldn’t not watch. I was horrified, but
fascinated at the same time, like a gawker slowing as he drives past
some horrific automobile wreck — not wanting to see a mangled body, but
looking all the same.

My eyes flew to the patient’s face; tears flowed from the corners of
her eyes. I could see she was in pain. The nurse dabbed the woman’s face
with a tissue.
“Just breathe,” the nurse gently coached her. “Breathe.”
“It’s almost over,” I whispered. I wanted to stay focused on her, but my eyes shot back to the image on the screen.

At first, the baby didn’t seem aware of the cannula. It gently probed the baby’s side, and for a quick second I felt relief. Of course, I thought. The fetus doesn’t feel pain. I had reassured countless women of this as I’d been taught by Planned Parenthood. The fetal tissue feels nothing as it is removed. Get a grip, Abby. This is a simple, quick medical procedure. My
head was working hard to control my responses, but I couldn’t shake an
inner disquiet that was quickly mounting to horror as I watched the
screen.

The next movement was the sudden jerk of a tiny foot as the baby
started kicking, as if it were trying to move away from the probing
invader. As the cannula pressed its side, the baby began struggling to
turn and twist away. It seemed clear to me that it could feel the
cannula, and it did not like what it was feeling. And then the doctor’s
voice broke through, startling me.
“Beam me up, Scotty,” he said lightheartedly to the nurse. He was
telling her to turn on the suction — in an abortion the suction isn’t
turned on until the doctor feels he has the cannula in exactly the right
place.

I had a sudden urge to yell, “Stop!” To shake the woman and say,
“Look at what is happening to your baby! Wake up! Hurry! Stop them!”

But even as I thought those words, I looked at my own hand holding
the probe. I was one of “them” performing this act. My eyes shot back to
the screen again. The cannula was already being rotated by the doctor,
and now I could see the tiny body violently twisting with it. For the
briefest moment the baby looked as if it were being wrung like a
dishcloth, twirled and squeezed. And then it crumpled and began
disappearing into the cannula before my eyes. The last thing I saw was
the tiny, perfectly formed backbone sucked into the tube, and then it
was gone. And the uterus was empty. Totally empty.

I was frozen in disbelief. Without realizing it, I let go of the
probe. It slipped off the patient’s tummy and slid onto her leg. I could
feel my heart pounding — pounding so hard my neck throbbed. I tried to
get a deep breath but couldn’t seem to breathe in or out. I still stared
at the screen, even though it was black now because I’d lost the image.
But nothing was registering to me. I felt too stunned and shaken to
move. I was aware of the doctor and nurse casually chatting as they
worked, but it sounded distant, like vague background noise, hard to
hear over the pounding of my own blood in my ears.
The image of the tiny body, mangled and sucked away, was replaying in
my mind, and with it the image of Grace’s first ultrasound — how she’d
been about the same size. And I could hear in my memory one of the many
arguments I’d had with my husband, Doug, about abortion.

“When you were pregnant with Grace, it wasn’t a fetus; it was a baby,” Doug had said. And now it hit me like a lightning bolt: He
was right! What was in this woman’s womb just a moment ago was alive.
It wasn’t just tissue, just cells. It was a human baby. And it was
fighting for its life! A battle it lost in the blink of an eye. What I
have told people for years, what I’ve believed and taught and defended,
is a lie.

Suddenly I felt the eyes of the doctor and nurse on me. It shook me
out of my thoughts. I noticed the probe lying on the woman’s leg and
fumbled to get it back into place. But my hands were shaking now.

“Abby, are you OK?” the doctor asked. The nurse’s eyes searched my face with concern.
“Yeah, I’m OK.” I still didn’t have the probe correctly positioned,
and now I was worried because the doctor couldn’t see inside the uterus.
My right hand held the probe, and my left hand rested gingerly on the
woman’s warm belly. I glanced at her face — more tears and a grimace of
pain. I moved the probe until I’d recaptured the image of her now-empty
uterus. My eyes traveled back to my hands. I looked at them as if they
weren’t even my own.

How much damage have these hands done over the past eight years?
How many lives have been taken because of them? Not just because of my
hands, but because of my words. What if I’d known the truth, and what if
I’d told all those women?
What if?
I had believed a lie! I had blindly promoted the “company line” for
so long. Why? Why hadn’t I searched out the truth for myself? Why had I
closed my ears to the arguments I’d heard? Oh, dear God, what had I
done?
My hand was still on the patient’s belly, and I had the sense that I
had just taken something away from her with that hand. I’d robbed her.
And my hand started to hurt — I felt an actual physical pain. And right
there, standing beside the table, my hand on the weeping woman’s belly,
this thought came from deep within me:

Never again! Never again.
I went into autopilot. As the nurse cleaned up the woman, I put away
the ultrasound machine, then gently roused the patient, who was limp and
groggy. I helped her sit up, coaxed her into a wheelchair, and took her
to the recovery room. I tucked a light blanket around her. Like so many
patients I’d seen before, she continued to cry, in obvious emotional
and physical pain. I did my best to make her more comfortable.

Ten minutes, maybe 15 at most, had passed since Cheryl had asked me
to go help in the exam room. And in those few minutes, everything had
changed. Drastically. The image of that tiny baby twisting and
struggling kept replaying in my mind. And the patient. I felt so guilty.
I’d taken something precious from her, and she didn’t even know it.

How had it come to this? How had I let this happen? I had invested
myself, my heart, my career in Planned Parenthood because I cared about
women in crisis. And now I faced a crisis of my own.
Looking back now on that late September day of 2009, I realize how
wise God is for not revealing our future to us. Had I known then the
firestorm I was about to endure, I might not have had the courage to
move forward. As it was, since I didn’t know, I wasn’t yet looking for
courage. I was, however, looking to understand how I found myself in
this place — living a lie, spreading a lie, and hurting the very women I
so wanted to help.

And I desperately needed to know what to do next.
This is my story.To read the rest of the book, click here.

WASHINGTON, D.C., September 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com)
– A group of six dozen Congressmen have asked House Speaker John
Boehner to use every parliamentary procedure available to him in order
to exempt the American people from the HHS mandate and protect religious
liberty.

In effect, the strategy – contained in a letter drafted by Congressman
Joe Pitts, R-PA, and signed by 72 Congressmen – would force Senate
Democrats to repeal the HHS mandate or risk either shutting down the
government or defaulting on the national debt.

Under the terms of the Affordable Care Act's HHS mandate, employers
must provide all employees with insurance plans that include
abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception with no
co-pay, or pay a fine of $100 per employee per day.

Business owners who are evangelical, Catholic, or otherwise hold to
traditional values have sought relief from ObamaCare's crushing
provisions in the courts.

It immediately received the strong support of the nation's Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Cardinal Sean O'Malley of Boston, chairman of the U.S. Conference of
Catholic Bishops (USCCB) Committee on Pro-Life Activities, urged
Congress to pass the bill within a week of its introduction.
However, the legislation stands little chance of passing the Democrat-controlled Senate – at least, on its own.

Rather than have a direct vote, the representatives are asking Boehner
to attach the bill's provisions to either the continuing resolution that
keeps government funded past next Tuesday, or to legislation allowing
the government to raise the debt ceiling.H.R. 940 's sponsors – Diane Black, R–TN; Jeff Fortenberry, R–NE; and John Fleming, R–LA – were among the letter's signatories.

The Congressmen told Boehner they “respectfully request that you ensure
that adequate protections for these fundamental liberties.”
The FY14 Continuing Resolution would fund the government for the coming fiscal year, which begins October 1.
The nation will reach its debt limit by October 17, if Congress does not raise it.
House Republicans have concentrated on the debt ceiling limit,
introducing a number of provisions building the Keystone XL Pipeline,
repealing crushing EPA regulations on coal, and limiting medical
malpractice suits.
According to one report, a Congressman also suggested including a 20-week abortion ban in the resolution.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said
this afternoon that President Obama would not allow House Republicans
to “extort” his signature health care bill by placing legislative
qualifications on its funding.
Obama, he said, will not “engage in an attempt by Republicans to extort
from him what they could not get through the legislative process, what
they could not get at the ballot box, what they could not get at the
Supreme Court.”
He added that Republican attempts to defund ObamaCare would "derail the essential function of government."

If a conscience measure were to pass, it could be stripped out before
being signed into law. Or the president could attempt to raise the debt
ceiling without congressional authorization.

“People have to recognize there’s never any compromise until the stakes are high,” Representative Dana Rohrabacher, R-CA, said.The letter reads in full:

Dear Speaker Boehner:
As fellow pro-life Members of Congress committed to protecting the
right to life, religious freedom, and the rights of conscience, we would
like to thank you for your past support and again respectfully request
that you ensure that adequate protections for these fundamental
liberties are included in legislation that will be signed into law
before January 1, 2014. Specifically, we are asking that you incorporate
H.R. 940, the Health Care Conscience Rights Act, along with a cessation
of federal dollars for abortions into the continuing resolution or on
legislation addressing the debt ceiling.
The provisions of H.R. 940 would amend the Affordable Care Act (ACA)
to ensure that the federal government cannot require
individuals,charities, or businesses to buy insurance coverage that
includes items or services against which they have deeply held moral or
religious objections. It would also ensure that the federal government,
and any state or local government receiving federal financial assistance
does not discriminate against any health care entity or worker for
abiding by their conscience and refusing to provide, train, or refer for
abortion services. The Health Care Conscience Rights Act would ensure a
private right of action for victims facing discriminatory practices.
A growing number of court cases assert a pattern of federal
discrimination against religious freedoms enshrined in and protected by
theFirst Amendment. In fact, more than 200 plaintiffs have filed suit
against the unconstitutional HHS mandate. First issued on August 3, 2011
the HHS Mandate requires that insurance plans include “all Food and
Drug Administration approved contraceptive methods, sterilization
procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with
reproductive capacity.”
Most recently, a federal appeals court ruled on September 17, 2013
that Michigan-based Autocam Corporation does not have legal standing to
seek an exemption from providing certain drug coverage now required
under Obamacare. This ruling is despite the fact that the HHS Mandate
violates the deeply held religious beliefs of the Kennedy family, devout
members of the Catholic Church and the owners and operators of Autocam
Corporation. The Kennedys seek to run their business in full accord with
their Christian beliefs including a commitment to provide generous
medical benefits to employees. Under Obamacare’s HHS Mandate the
Kennedys would be forced to choose between adhering to their Catholic
beliefs and paying ruinous fines or violating their conscience.
The egregious anti-religious, anti-life provisions of Obamacare do not end here.
Prior to passage of the Affordable Care Act federal law was explicitly
clear that federal funds do not subsidize insurance coverage that
includes abortion. However, the new health reform package rolls back
decades of abortion policy and instead pays for policies with elective
abortion.

Anyone who enrolls in a federally-subsidized health care plan that
covers elective abortions will pay a separate “abortion fee” of at least
$1 per month into an abortion slush fund to pay for abortion on demand.
In addition, under the secrecy clause, plans that cover abortion are
only allowed to disclose the abortion surcharge “as a part of the
summary of benefits and coverage explanation, at the time of
enrollment.” Many families may choose a plan that covers abortion
without realizing it or because thatplan is the only one that covers the
critical care that their family needs.
In addition, under the ACA, the law directs the Office of Personnel
Management (OPM) to contract with and administer several health
insurance plans to be made available across the country (referred to as
multi-state plans). Until passage of the new health care law, the
Director of OPM was forbidden from contracting with plans that pay for
elective abortion. Under the new health care law, the opposite is true.
The Director of OPM may administer plans that cover elective abortion
and even ensure that elective abortion is included in all but one of the
plans he or she administers.
For this reason, as the health insurance exchanges go into effect,
beginning October 1, 2013, Congress must enact legislation that stops
the public funding of abortion coverage in the ACA.

This attack on the pro-life conscience of America demands immediate
congressional action. Nothing short of a full exemption for both
non-profit and for-profit entities will satisfy the rights guaranteed in
the First Amendment, and nothing but a complete prohibition on public
funding for abortion coverage will keep the status quo under the Hyde
amendment. In recent years, the Obama Administration has committed
unprecedented attacks against the unborn and the religious freedoms
guaranteed in the Constitution, all under the guise of “access to health
care.” Congress cannot ignore this relentless assault on life and the
First Amendment.

Wendy Davis said to be set to run for Governor of Texas

By Dave Andrusko

Pro-abortion Texas state Senator Wendy Davis

Attributing the information to “two unnamed Democrats with knowledge
of her decision,” the Associated Press is reporting that pro-abortion
Texas state Senator Wendy Davis will run for governor to replace
pro-life Gov. Rick Perry, who chose not to seek another term. In all
likelihood, Davis will square off against pro-life Attorney General Greg
Abbott.

Earlier this month, Davis used an email to supporters to say she
would state her 2014 intentions—a run for governor or United States
senator—by early October.

Davis rose to media super-stardom when she filibustered HB 2, a
pro-life measure with many components including a ban on abortions after
20 weeks, a time by which the unborn child can feel pain, and
commonsense regulations for the largely unregulated abortion trade.
But Gov. Perry called a second special session and HB 2 passed.

Democrats haven’t won a state-wide race in the Lone Star State since
1990 when Ann Richards won the contest for governor. (She lost four
years later to George W. Bush). And Republicans will be sure to remind
Texans that Davis is of the same party as President Obama, who lost
Texas by 11.8% in 2008 and 15.8% in 2012.

According to published accounts, Attorney General Abbott currently
has a hefty fundraising advantage over Davis, but the universal
consensus is that Davis will be able to raise plenty of money, much of
it from out of state.

But what made her a “icon” to liberals—the filibuster—may not play
well in Texas. For example the ban on post-20 week abortions, which
Davis filibustered, was supported by 62% of Texans, according to a June
University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll.
One other point about the filibuster and a contest for governor. As
anyone who has studied abortion politics would have predicted, the
approach Davis will take is not to talk about WHAT she defended (how
could she?) but rather to turn the discussion into a celebration of her
“courage” against a wholly imaginary “hostile” reaction by
Republicans—a.k.a. a “war” not only against women in general but Davis
in particular.

The usual pro-abortion forces will add their own resources, which include the capacity to demagogue on a colossal scale.
But what else would you expect? That is who they have been, are, and always will be.

Inside the mind of abortionist and convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell: Part Four of Four

By Dave AndruskoThere
are two reasons for today’s Part Four devoted to what was revealed (and
hidden) by an investigation into abortionist and convicted murderer
Kermit Gosnell. There was more to ponder, and I wanted to see what
others outside the pro-life orbit would say about Steve Volk’s story for
“Philadelphia” magazine which he turned into a small e-book.
Slate’s Amanda Marcotte, as pro-abortion as they get, makes two
astute observations. She rightly notes that there is not a lot new in
Volk’s oddly titled piece “Kermit Gosnell’s Babies” and that Volk is
trying desperately hard to make Gosnell’s conviction on three counts of
first-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter symbolic
of some larger political importance. (There were politics
involved—pro-abortion politics.)

As you would expect, Marcotte misses/avoids all the specifics that
makes Gosnell so shocking and reprehensible. She chooses instead to
burnish the credentials of the “reputable abortion community” which, she
says, Volk failed to mention “rejected Gosnell.” That “respectable”
pro-abortionists shielded Gosnell for at least 17 years goes
unmentioned.

And, as I anticipated, those that did mention Volk’s piece still
don’t get what the case was about. Take CNN’s Jake Tapper. He intones
that “Kermit Gosnell was called a monster for what he did, and how he
did it–ending the lives of fetuses past the legal limit in
Pennsylvania.” True, he did abort babies past the legal limit in
Pennsylvania (a limit which Volk makes clear Gosnell felt only contempt
for). However what earned his three consecutive life sentences was not
that he aborted past 24 weeks but rather that he aborted babies (not
“fetuses”) alive and then murdered them by slitting their spinal cords.

But Tapper (assisted by Jessica Metzger) does observe in passing

“There is also an incredibly
fascinating antidote [anecdote] about Gosnell fleeing the country in
1972, after taking part in a horrific abortion experiment.”

That part of the story is an antidote to anyone who persuades
themselves that pro-lifers are to blame for the politics behind
Gosnell’s “House of Horrors.” The truth is that pro-abortionists did not
want “access” limited, so they simply looked the other way or refused
to investigate clear evidence that the Women’s Medical Society was a
hell-hole, including the death of Semika Shaw in March 2000. And that
directive came directly from the governor’s office, as the Philadelphia
Grand Jury report made clear.
The antidote/anecdote speaks volumes about Gosnell. (For a full explanation, see “Abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s ‘Mother’s Day Massacre.’”
In 1972 he participated in a hideous experiment on unsuspecting women
in their second trimester that to this day is almost beyond belief.
According to the Grand Jury, Gosnell used an experimental device called a
super coil [“basically plastic razors that were formed into a ball”]
“developed by a California man named Harvey Karman, who had run an
underground abortion service in the 1950s.” But instead of “only”
slicing the unborn baby, it also tore up the women’s insides. The Grand
Jury wrote

“The federal Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health
subsequently did an investigation that detailed serious complications
suffered by nine of the 15 women, including one who needed a
hysterectomy.

Not only does this tell us all we need to know about Gosnell’s
attitude towards his patients, what Volk says next reminds us that even
in the 1970s Gosnell was not particularly worried about prosecution:

“Gosnell fled to the Bahamas [for a
year], reasoning that if Pennsylvania’s board of medicine failed to take
action in his absence, he might return to find his license still
valid.”

Which proved to be the case then, and later, as the abuses piled up.
Volk elaborates on the tack taken by the headline writer for the
Philadelphia Daily News. He/she labeled David Gambacorta’s 2010
interview with Gosnell–“DOCTOR FROM HELL . . . OR GODSEND?”
Volk keeps trying to emphasize how to parts of the community Gosnell
remains a hero—“The Good Doctor.” He is never able to explain why
Gosnell’s career “bifurcated” when he came back from the Bahamas:

“His return to the States within a
year, and eventually to Philadelphia begins a narrative that splits in
two, with one track spanning a life of routine good deeds and another
leading to indictments encompassing more than 200 criminal deeds.”

Volk rejects the prosecution’s argument: greed. Gosnell made $1.8
million a year and had properties galore. But since Gosnell lived in
unimaginable squalor and left many purchases unopened, that convinces
Volk it must be something else.

Volk offers his own bevy of explanations which begins with Gosnell’s
insistence that he was looking for more “merciful” ways to abort. His
staff said Gosnell stopped using Digoxin to attempt to kill the child in
utero, because he was so incompetent. Gosnell denies he stopped. Why is
that important to Gosnell?

“He said he’d never actually seen a
baby move, beyond a ‘reflex’ when the scissors snipped the spinal cord.
He snipped the necks of dead babies, he claimed, merely to prevent any
possible pain reception—as if dead babies feel any pain at all.”

Volk chases him down but Gosnell continues to bob and weave.

“I pressed him on this, explaining
that it simply didn’t seem credible for a medical doctor to be worrying
about the pain experienced by a fetus he felt sure was dead. …He could
never explain himself. And his answers seemed carefully couched: ‘I
never saw anything I took as fetal movement.’”

The piece comes to a preliminary climax when Volk provides Gosnell
with a rational for what he had done in a direct and more eloquent way
than Gosnell could articulate. In an email, Gosnell tells him, in
effect, you got it, buddy. Volk tells us

“I stared at that email for a long
time, because as near as I could figure it, Kermit Gosnell was on the
verge of confessing. He used unlicensed, unqualified staff, leading
directly to the death of Karnamaya Mongar, because he simply didn’t
respect state regulations. He judged the length of pregnancy of the
women who walked into his office not on strictly medical terms, but
based on his own ethical judgment: If my daughter were in these
circumstances, would I want her to have access to an abortion? And
finally, according to staff members, babies did—by the operative legal
definition—show signs of life at 3801 Lancaster. Then Kermit Barron
Gosnell, presiding, stabbed them in the back of the neck with scissors.
Only in his mind, because he had injected them with Digoxin, they were
going to die anyway. To him, their weak movements weren’t signs of life;
they were signs of how close death stood.” …

“’Dr. Gosnell,’ I told him, ‘you’ve admitted, on all the major charges, you’re guilty.’

“He was quiet for a long time before saying in a slow, weary voice: ‘No, I’m innocent.’

So what is Volk’s own “explanation” for how Gosnell could do what he
did (and implicitly, live with himself)? First, we read Gosnell’s
all-purpose excuse.
“In an ideal word,” he responded, “We’d have no need for abortion.
But bringing a child into the world when it cannot be provided for, that
there are not sufficient systems to support, is a greater sin. I
consider myself to be in a war against poverty, and I feel comfortable
with the things I did and the decisions I made.”

This prompts Volk to write

“Suddenly, the central mystery of
Gosnell—How could he kill those babies?–had an answer: In his mind they
were casualties of that larger war; their blooming and birthing and the
suffering they would experience and cause represent a greater harm, a
bigger sin, than pruning them away.”

In other words, “in his own mind,” all the ghastly things Gosnell had
done (“the lies to his staff, the babies he killed, the bogus
ultrasound measurements and unsafe, unsanitary conditions”) were
“forgiven: The situational ethics demanded of a man at war.”
Talk about a cop-out.

One final thought. You KNEW there had to be a kind of moral
equivalency lurking somewhere in the piece. We would be told that,
ethically, in some way, Gosnell and pro-lifers had been separated at
birth. But how?

Gosnell insists he was and is a Christian (now that he is in prison
he’s taken up studying the Bible for the first time, we’re told). And
Volk takes Gosnell’s reference to “sin” as evidence he has a kind of
religiosity.

Blend that half-baked religiosity with a faith–so to speak–in
“situational ethics” (earlier Gosnell told Volk, “I am a big believer in
situational ethics”), mix it with an overweening “sense of
righteousness” and, voila, you get the religiosity that, Volk argues,
“We normally think of …as the province of the pro-life movement.”

Oh.
Gosnell made his peace with what he was doing a long time ago–long
before the woman who started coming into his abortion clinic were much
further along in their pregnancies. His “bifurcation”—practically Dr.
Welby to some members of his community for his care during the day and a
moral monster at night—is straight out of Robert Lewis Stevenson.
He could be a soldier in the war on poverty and make money hand over
fist off of poor women of color by performing, according to Volk, up to
25 second trimester abortions on “any given Tuesday” (or Wednesday or
Thursday). As the women got bigger Gosnell just adjusted the ultrasound
results so that they were always close to the legal limit of 24 weeks.
Gosnell has such contempt for the law on abortion (and murder) that he has to blame “religion and politics” for his trial.

“I have come to believe that the
presumption of guilt was compounded by religious convictions,’ Gosnell
said. … ‘Were you aware that Seth [Williams, Philadelphia’s district
attorney] was an altar boy? Did you know of the strong Catholic presence
in the homicide division?””

His attorney, Jack McMahon, feeds into Gosnell’s enormous ego and sense of persecution.

“Relatively well-off law-enforcement
personnel, he said, with no experience of abortion clinics could not
have been prepared for what they would see.”

What did these “relatively well-off law-enforcement personnel” see?
Here’s what former employees Latosha Lewis and Kareema Cross told the
Grand Jury.

“They described the odor that struck
one immediately upon entering – a mix of smells emanating from the
cloudy fish tank where the turtles were fed crushed clams and baby
formula; and from boxes of medical waste that sat around for weeks at a
time, leaking blood, whenever Gosnell failed to pay the bill to the
disposal company. They described blood-splattered floors, and
blood-stained chairs in which patients waited for and then recovered
from abortions. Even the stirrups on the procedure table were often
caked with dried blood that was not cleaned off between procedures.
There were cat feces and hair throughout the facility, including in the
two procedure rooms. Gosnell, they said, kept two cats at the facility
(until one died) and let them roam freely.

“The cats not only defecated
everywhere, they were infested with fleas. They slept on beds in the
facility when patients were not using them.”

But that was only the physical setting. When officers raided the
clinic, they found half-naked, drug-stupored women in various stages of
delivery of huge babies, all of whom were (un)attended by untrained,
unsupervised staff dispensing powerful drugs for which they had no
medical training. It was straight out of Dante’s Inferno.

Gosnell was not a “rogue” (the favorite term pro-abortionists use to
distance themselves from Gosnell). My guess is that, over time, we will
find there are more just like him—minus the lice and dead cats

Thursday, September 26, 2013

Is Abortion justified when a baby is disabled?

By Paul StarkThe
New York Times recently published an article titled “My Abortion, at 23
Weeks.” The author explains that she was pregnant with twins, a boy and
a girl, but that the boy was diagnosed with a herniated diaphragm. He
would require surgery and life support for a period after birth.

The author and her husband could not bear “the thought of hearing him
gasp for air,” so they chose to have their son aborted with a lethal
injection into his heart. “He died in a warm and loving place, inside
me,” she writes. It was for his own good, she thought.
Is abortion justified in the case of a fetal disability, “deformity”
or “defect”? Is it justified when an unborn child is expected to die
during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after? These circumstances—though
they account for only a tiny fraction of abortions—are gut-wrenching.
They call for some clear moral thinking.
Two points about the abortion of disabled babies are important.
First, ability (or disability) is irrelevant to the worth and dignity of
a human being. We do not (or should not) think less of people who have
physical and mental handicaps. Parents may not kill their toddler if
they learn that she has autism. They may not execute a 10-year-old with
spina bifida because they think she would be better off dead.

Since disability itself does not justify killing, the killing of
disabled unborn babies could only be justified if the unborn (whether
disabled or not) do not have the same value and right to life as human
beings at later developmental stages, such as toddlers and 10-year-old
children. But this is only a different form of discrimination. Just as
ability is irrelevant to human value, so too is age, size and location.
All human beings share an equal right to life simply by virtue of their
humanity. Killing disabled people, in the womb or out, is morally wrong.

Second, it is deeply mistaken to suppose that the life of a disabled
person is not worth living. People with disabilities live meaningful and
often happy lives. And caring for them, though difficult, is enriching
and rewarding, as parents and caregivers attest.

Sometimes a child in the womb is diagnosed with a disease or
condition that is fatal. She will likely die before, during or shortly
after birth. Surely a pregnant woman should not have to endure such an
emotionally traumatic pregnancy, abortion advocates argue.
But the fact that someone will soon die provides no moral
justification for killing her. We may not kill terminal patients in the
cancer ward or elderly grandparents in the nursing home. All of us, in
fact, will die at some point in the future, but we ought to be treated
with dignity and respect in the present. The reality of natural death
(by disease) does not mean that unnatural death (intentional killing) is
okay.

Moreover, abortion even in these tragic circumstances does not serve
the emotional and psychological health of pregnant women. “There is no
research to support the popular assumption that terminating the
pregnancy is easier on the mother psychologically,” explains
PerinatalHospice.org. “In fact, research to date suggests the opposite.”
One 2004 study (published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics
and Gynecology) concludes that abortion due to “fetal malformation” is a
“traumatic event” that “entails the risk of severe and complicated
grieving.”
There is another option. Perinatal hospice acknowledges terminally
ill unborn children as real patients while providing support to grieving
families. This is a wonderful alternative that is ethical,
compassionate and healthy for everyone involved. Organizations that help
families deal with adverse prenatal diagnoses include Prenatal Partners
for Life and Be Not Afraid.
Caring is always better than killing.

Editor’s note. Paul Stark is Communications Associate for
Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life This ran in the summer 2013 issue
of MCCL News.

Should-have-been birthdays

As
summer turns to autumn and the leaves on the trees begin changing hues
and the air gets a bit cooler, my heart remembers. This is the time of
year I should have welcomed my first child into the world. He should be
turning four this year, as he was due at the end of September or
beginning of October.

He should be playing, laughing, learning, growing, and a part of my
every day. I should be baking a birthday cake with four candles to be
blown out. The day should be full of balloons, presents, and all things
related to a little boy’s birthday.

Instead, I must carry the weight of his absence for the rest of my
days on earth. I carry the grief over losing him and knowing he should
be here, bringing joy and beauty to this world, had it not been for
a sinful decision I made. Regret barely conveys the depth of
my profound emotion. At times over the past four years, the deep grief
and sorrow has threatened to consume me.

If I had not taken the RU-486 pill on February 6, 2009 at 6 weeks
gestation, I would have a four-year-old now. Although it was too early
to know for sure he was a boy, I believe God has revealed
that knowledge to me. A son whom I’ve named Luke Shiloh, meaning “light
and peace” because God has brought light in the midst of the deepest
darkness and peace to my wounded and aching heart.

I was distraught as my baby grew, distraught as I took that little
pill that I thought would “fix things” and distraught afterwards. I did
not fight for my baby’s life, like a mother should. I did not place his
life before my desperate thoughts of self-preservation. I was deceived
into thinking he was not really a baby yet at that gestation, so what I
was doing was perfectly okay.

A fog settles in on my heart around this time of year, just as a
thick fog settles on a city on a cold, rainy day. I don’t quite know how
to picture how my Luke would look, who he would have grown to be by
now. Each time I try to imagine, it seems just out of my grasp, like how
a dream feels when you’re waking up and trying to remember what you
were dreaming of. Healing has taken place. But, the ‘what-ifs’ remain.
What would my baby be like today if I had chosen LIFE? What color would
his eyes be … would he like trainsor dinosaurs …what
shape would his nose have … what would his first word have been … who
would he be growing up to be … a mighty man of God … a voice for unborn
life …

When I made “the choice” that should never have been mine to
make, nobody ever told me about how each year, I would ponder what might
have been.
It is my prayer that in being honest about the devastating reality of
abortion and how it’s a decision that impacts the rest of one’s life,
other women will not buy into the lie that it’s the quick fix to a tough
situation. The challenges of an unintended pregnancy are temporary, but
the scar of abortion lasts a lifetime. I shudder at the thought that
anyone else live through the “should-have-been birthdays” and other
painful anniversary dates.

But, for those of us who did believe abortion to be the easy fix and
must go on without our babies, I declare this - there is healing and
hope to be found after your child is gone. You can never have your child
back, but his/her life can make an impact on this world! For the men
and women who cannot undo their devastating “choice,” it is my hope and
prayer that through our stories, others will choose LIFE. This is a call
to action – we must stand up and be willing to share the truth of how
abortion hurts everyone involved. We must be the voice for our children
who lost their voice. We must sound the alarm on their behalf.

I would give anything to go back and embrace Luke Shiloh’s life, but
since I cannot, I will live with this profound loss forever. The grief I feel is hardly as big as the love. This abiding love
I have for my baby knows no bounds. My heart is broken that I
discovered this love too late. Nonetheless, I have hope in the assurance
that I will know him in eternity in a way that I never would have
here. It brings me great joy to tell others of his valuable life and the
beauty God has wrought in me due to his precious life. God has placed
within me a passion and purpose because of him…
If you are in search of a way to honor your lost baby on what would
have been their birthday, consider lighting a candle, writing them a
letter, naming him/her, having a balloon release, or getting a name
plate for them at the National Memorial for the Unborn in Chattanooga,
Tennessee. I have found it crucial on my journey towards healing to take
active steps to honor, remember, and celebrate Luke Shiloh.

The words from Flipsyde’s song “Happy Birthday,” about
his aborted child, resound in my head during this time each year… “Happy
birthday, Luke Shiloh, I love you, whoever you would have been.”

Though he went to Heaven before taking his first breath, my precious
child’s life is worthy of celebration; so in his honor each year, I will
bake him that birthday cake.

One-child policy still a massive threat to women, expert warns

Rome, Italy, Sep 25, 2013 (CNA/EWTN News)– In the wake of the 33rd
anniversary of China’s one-child policy, a women’s rights activist has
raised concern about those who believe the policy has ended, warning of
the dangers it still poses.

“The one child policy is definitely still happening. Any report that
states that China is abandoning the ne-child policy is false,” Reggie
Littlejohn said in a Sept. 22 interview with CNA.
Littlejohn is the founder and president of “Women’s Rights Without
Frontiers,” an international coalition aimed at exposing forced
abortion, gendercide, and sexual slavery in China.
Wednesday marks the anniversary of the country’s one-child policy,
which was instituted during the Mao era in China in 1979 as a means of
population control. The measure restricts most Chinese families to one
child each, and uses a quota reward system for the Family Planning
Officials who carry out the birth control policies.

“The one-child policy causes more violence towards women and girls
than any other official policy on earth, than any other official policy
in the history of the world,” Littlejohn said, adding that the Chinese
communist party has boasted about having “prevented four hundred million
lives” through the policy.

“Women are forced to abort babies up
to the ninth month of pregnancy, and sometimes these forced abortions
are so violent that the women themselves die along with their full-term
babies.”

In addition to her advocacy for China’s women, Littlejohn also led
the international effort to free Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng, who
arrived in the United States in May, 2013.
Known as an international expert on the country’s one-child policy,
she has testified at the U.S. Congress as well as the European, British
and Irish Parliaments, and has briefed the White House, the U.S.
Department of State, and the Vatican on the issues of women’s rights in
China. Most recently, she addressed a maternal health care conference in
Rome, where she was able to meet Pope Francis.
Littlejohn rejected media perceptions in the West that the one-child
policy is waning, countering that “when the Chinese communist party
tweaks the policy, makes a minor adjustment to it, for some reason that
fact gets reported as ‘China is abandoning the one-child policy,’ which
is not true.”
According to her, coercion involved in the one-child policy is being used to keep the communist party in power.

“The core of the policy, the centerpiece of the policy, is not how
many children the government allows a woman to have, it’s the coercion
with which they enforce the limit,” she said.
Littlejohn added that even if a couple is granted a second child,
they would still need to have a birth permit – if they do not get one,
the mother is still subject to a forced abortion until the end of her
term.
Outside of forced abortion, the one-child policy has opened the door
to other human rights issues, such as human trafficking and gendercide,
Littlejohn said.
“The fact that the Chinese government imposes this coercive low birth
limit, combine that with the preference for boys and what you end up
with is sex-selective abortion, or gendercide.”
“Right now there are thirty-seven million more men living in China
than women,” she said, “and that’s driving human trafficking and sexual
slavery, not only within China but the surrounding countries.”

Littlejohn said that the coercion used to enforce the one-child
policy serves the double purpose to also keep the communist party in
place in China, stating that when the policy was initiated, the birth
rate was about 5.9, whereas now it “more like 1.7, which is well below
2.1.”
“China’s population problem is not that they have too many people,
it’s that they have too few young people. So I believe that it has
transformed into a policy of social control that’s a way for the Chinese
government to demonstrate its power.”

She also listed China’s system of informants, who are specifically
assigned to watch women and report anyone whose abdomens “look bigger
than they should,” and the money that the government makes in profit
from the “exorbitant” fines they charge to families with more than one
child, among the reasons she believes that the policy is being used to
keep the current party in place.
When the informants catch a woman, Littlejohn said, China’s Family
Planning Police come “in the middle of the night, grabbing women out of
their beds, strapping them down to tables and forcing them to abort
babies they want up to the ninth month of pregnancy.”

“That is a form of violence against
women, its official government rape in my opinion, and it’s a way of
terrorizing the entire population.”

Littlejohn emphasized the need to raise awareness about the one-child
policy, pointing to the resources on her group’s website as a place to
start. The video, “Stop Forced Abortion: China’s War Against Women,”
gives a short, but good introduction that can easily be shared on social
media to help spread information, she said.
She also suggested her organization’s “Save a Girl” campaign, which
offers a monthly stipend for a year to mothers who are considering
aborting their babies, simply because they are girls, as a way to give
assistance.

After being offered the stipend, in “ninety-five percent of the cases, women choose to keep their daughters,” Littlejohn noted.

“Whenever I feel sort of frustrated about the enormity of ending
forced-abortion in China,” she said, “I’ve got this binder of all these
beautiful faces of these baby girls that we’re saving.”